Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @06:11PM
from the so-my-money's-wasted-on-nuclear-batteries dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "The Bluetooth SIG announced the formal adoption of Bluetooth Core Specification Version 4.0, which begins the qualification process for new, low-power devices. Bluetooth 4.0 [zipped PDF of the spec] was formally announced in April, and added a new, ultra-low-power aspect to the short-range personal-area-network technology. According to the SIG, the new 4.0 core specification should allow devices to run on coin-cell batteries for years with a new ultra-low-power duty mode."

I would imagine table-top nuclear fusion would be in your best interest also. But since "they" are ultimately the ones who get all the cash, it's only fair "they" do the job. Unlike this [bbc.co.uk] guy, who's doing it himself. Yes, I'm not a nuclear physicist.

I want nuclear fusion that can fit in my pocket. That, combined with my Quasimodo-esque looks, will almost certainly guarantee that I never reproduce (which could only result further degradation of the planet's gene pool);-)

I want nuclear fusion that can fit in my pocket. That, combined with my Quasimodo-esque looks, will almost certainly guarantee that I never reproduce (which could only result further degradation of the planet's gene pool);-)

You can get nuclear fission that'll fit in your pocket now, and safely generate electricity.

Betavoltaics are not fission, they are radioactive decay. Fission is when one dense nucleus splits into smaller ones. Fusion is when two smaller ones combine to form another one. Decay is when one transmutes into another form, emitting radiation. In the case of betavoltaics, you have a neutron decaying into a proton and an electron (beta particle), and a neutrino that you can safely ignore. The electron is captured to generate power. No fission required.

Yeah, but fusion IS possible. It's real science, none of this "OMG I CAN GET PERPETUAL MOTION!!!!ONEONE!!" nonsense. Fusion just has a bunch of problems that will be solved as technology progresses, there's no underlying concept that dooms it. It's a lot of "we don't have magnets that are more efficient" or "we can't contain a plasma stream of such a high temperature", things that are solved with new materials given some time.

3.0 was announced a while back, and was basically about bluetooth protocol over wifi radio if both where available in the same device.

this so you get the obex profiles and such, but with wifi speeds.

thats one of the things i have always liked about bluetooth, the profiles. With wifi you first need to set up a hotspot or ad-hoc connection. then there is tcp/ip. And then you need to find some kind of protocol that both parties can use to share files over.

Great, all those earpiece douchebags can talk longer and louder, and Minivan Mommie can swerve around in traffic even longer.

That's actually not the kind of problem space the ultra-low-power form of the spec is aimed at. Rather, it's a competitor to ANT -- ya know, the protocol your bicycle's speedometer uses to talk to the sensor reading the magnet on the wheel, or that the pedometer in your shoes uses to tell your watch how far you're walking.

This bit from TFA links has me a bit worried. With the mobility of these devices compared to WiFi, which is relatively non-mobile, what sort of walking interference (Bluetooth vs. WiFi) can we expect from 4.0 devices?

Moreover, an increased modulation index has actually increased the effective range from 30 feet or so, to beyond 200 feet.

I expect the ultra-low-power messages to be so rare (small packets with long, asynchronous delays between) that you won't see significant interference from that. When they are not sending, they have no signal; when they are sending, they don't send much. That's how they save power. "Classic" Bluetooth uses adaptive hopping to avoid interference with local wireless signals by dropping channels from the sequence if they show unusually high error rates. You shouldn't have a problem using it next to a WiFi

This is one thing I've been wondering about. What is the advantage of "low-power bluetooth" versus ANT? Will you be able to combine both "low-power" and "regular" bluetooth together on one chip so that I can use my bluetooth headphones while my bluetooth pedometer tells me how many steps I'm taking?

Yes. That's the idea. The low-power uses the same set of frequencies, just in a different way. I'm not sure whether you will be able to see the data from your pedometer on the phone while you are simultaneously having a conversation using a connected headset, but significant re-use of components is certainly designed in. There will be chips (such as those designed for phones) that support low-power as well as other modes. An often-cited scenario is to receive a call on your phone, read the caller name

Frankly, I don't buy that "study", either: are people working in call centers where they can overhear other one-sided conversations distracted by them? No.

Here's a test: would anyone be annoyed by a half-duplex bilingual conversation: one party speaking one language and the other speaking a different one? (Sometimes one comprehends better than one can speak, and their counterpart does as well in the exact opposite manner: this used to be common with English and Frenc

Eh? If you want to use ZigBee in your wireless gizmo, you buy a ZigBee module just like you buy a Bluetooth module, and put it in.

If you want to sell ZigBee modules that you make yourself, your company joins the ZigBee Alliance for $3500/year [zigbee.org], a trivial amount if you're paying yourself a salary (and if you're serious about compliance to the specification and using the ZigBee logo in your advertising).

If you want to sell someone else's ZigBee modules, you don't pay anything.

Do you think people will just throw away most of the little bluetooth devices that use this new low power spec when the battery runs out rather then going out to replace the batteries, as is so often the case with small consumer electronics like cheep watches? Maybe this will promote planned obsolescence in those sort of accessory devices.

I don't throw out my bicycle's speed and cadence sensors or my heartrate monitor when their batteries wear out -- sure, the battery may be $2 after a hefty markup, but the device it goes in is $30-70.

This just makes Bluetooth a competitor in that field, rather than needing to join the "ANT Alliance" to build anything that can communicate with the wireless sensors. As someone with the occasional hobby-project idea, I'm all for that!

With Bluetooth, you either had it or you didn't. After that, most users could give a rats rear end what the latest Bluetooth specifications are out there. If they get Bluetooth 4.0, it will be an "upgrade" when they replace their phone, buy a new car, or peripheral. Much in the same manor as cellphone camera. Meh, sure why not...

Yours must be broken or just plain crap, cuz mine works just fine with most certainly under 100 ms of lag (or unnoticeable)... Any delay from pushing play on my phone to hearing audio is caused by the application, not the bluetooth A2DP connection.

Given that "smart meters" will inevitably end up being connected to billing, I wouldn't be too optimistic about there being any fully open standard for how they do their reporting. They will probably use some sort of mostly-standard transport(ie. bluetooth, wifi, TCP/IP over whatever is handy) for economic reasons and, for similar economic reasons, we might end up with some sort of "industry consensus" type standard, where the equipment is more or less interoperable; but the details are rather hush-hush/pro